Catalog feed specification

The feed is critical to the success of the Optimizely Recommendations technology, and the quality of the feed affects the ease of integration, and recommendation quality.

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Note

If your website supports more than one location, see the Optimizely Catalog Feed Location document for how to handle this within the feed.

The product catalog feed, combined with the tracking script, lets Optimizely track visitor interaction and serve suitable recommendations. The feed is a file that includes all the products in the product catalog. For each product, there is an image link, title, identifier, URL, price, currency, and optional product attributes.

The quality of the product recommendations depends on the feed. For example, if the feed is not set up correctly, the wrong images, prices, or out-of-stock products may appear in the recommendations.

The following image shows how the feed is used within the Optimizely Recommendations technology.

Export the product catalog

An Optimizely scheduled job regularly exports the product catalog from Optimizely Commerce to be picked up by the product feed in Optimizely Product Recommendations. See Exporting your catalog to Optimizely Product Recommendations.

Import the product catalog

The product catalog is regularly imported through the product feed, combined with visitor track events, and processed by machine learning algorithms customized by the customer's merchandising rules, to produce product recommendations.

Optimizely reviews the feed at the initial setup. You can request additional content and/or attributes. An understanding of the required strategy determines what to include in the feed. The strategy is agreed by both parties before the feed is imported.

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Note

Specific attributes may present themselves as being necessary, and you may need meaning further revisions to the feed. You may request additional attributes after the continuous optimization and improvement process begins and some user behavior is collected.

Related blog post Check the Episerver Perform (now Optimizely Product Recommendations) catalog export feed by David-Tech.com